Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Meanings of Remembrance Both Luke’s account of the upper room (Luke 22:14–23) and Paul’s recounting in 1 Corinthians 11:23–25 record Jesus’ words that the Supper in the distribution of bread: “do this in remembrance of me” (τοῦτο ποιεῖτε εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν ἀνάμνησιν). 1 1 Corinthians 11:25 repeats the words in…
Genesis is a story of brotherly violence. Cain kills Abel. Jacob flees from Esau, his brother, to live with Laban, his mother’s brother, and ends up in a conflict with him too. Joseph’s brothers assault him, sell him away as a slave, and fake his death. All of this frames…
America is like a secular Holy Roman Empire. Contrary to dissidents who expect a collapse of the federal government, the implosion of the fiat dollar, or a national divorce into Jesusland and the United States of Canada, America will persist. Whether as a world hegemon or regional superpower, there is…
Many readers of the New Testament will, at some point or other, be troubled by the question of why Jesus’ earthly ministry did not address the Roman occupation. Perhaps as a child in Sunday school you were taught that the Jews were expecting a military deliverer, and that the form…
In a recent tweet , which he later expanded into a Substack post , Aaron Renn wrote about the importance of ‘picking the right ladders to climb’. One of our most critical life decisions, Renn argues, is that of choosing the right ‘status hierarchies’ to which we will commit ourselves;…
The Third Use of the Created Word “Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.” Those words are reflexive for almost any Anglican. Repeated nine times weekly at least during Lent and Advent if not year round, they are said between 54 and 468 times…
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In John’s gospel, Jesus famously says “I am” again and again. These allude to the Old Testament’s revelation of “I am,” but if we can press the wording, they are also statements about the being of Jesus. Let’s say they are ontological statements. The predicate, though, describes Jesus’ ministry in…
There are some dreams and visions scattered around the Old Testament, but no book as the kind of concentration of dreams as Daniel. Kings dream, and the prophet dreams. In Esther too, the dream of Ahasuerus is the turning point of the story. Zechariah sees a series of visions in…
Salvian the Presbytery was not impressed with the post-Constantinian Roman empire. In his treatise on The Governance of God (translated in Writings of Salvian the Presbyter F ), he denounced the vices of the majority of believers: “The Church herself, which should be the appeaser of God in all things,…
The social vision of Paul’s “Pastoral Epistles” seems so very conservative, so Greco-Romany bourgeois. They seem far too conservative to be genuinely Pauline, according to the consensus view among critical scholars. That reading of the Pastorals is somewhat plausible if one skims the surface. Paul reinforces accepted male-female role distinctions,…
When we read Jonah, our attention is naturally focused on the fascinating character of the prophet. He disobeys and flees, only to be cast a watery grave. He learns his lesson enough to obey the next time, but he’s awfully surly at the end about the withered plant. Insofar as…
When Habakkuk complains that the Lord isn’t doing anything about the violence and flouting of the law in Israel, Yahweh responds by telling the prophet the Chaldeans are coming. That’s not much of an answer, but there’s a hint that the Chaldean forces are from Yahweh: In verse 1:8, the…
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